Repeated leaks, blunders and allegations of heavy-handed tactics - how well did the police handle hacking?

Andy Coulson’s conviction goes some way to justify the extensive investigation despite criticism during the trial that police had acted like “scorched earwigs”.

Scotland Yard has put the cost of various operations surrounding allegations of illegal newspaper practices at around £32,700,000.

Police said the total number of News of the World (NotW) phone-hacking victims stands at 5,500, although around 2,000 are still unaware.

And under the scrutiny of defence barristers, gaps emerged, witnesses’ stories unravelled, and technical analysis was found to be flawed.

Even before Operation Weeting was launched in January 2011, there were missed opportunities to get to the bottom of hacking.

In 2002, Stuart Kuttner told Surrey Police about a Milly Dowler voicemail suggesting she might be alive, but the phone hacking only emerged in 2011 when the Guardian broke the story.

Then in 2006, when Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire were arrested, police stopped short of investigating all their victims.

This meant the scale of hacking and other victims including Prince William, Prince Harry and the then-Kate Middleton did not become publicly known until years later.

Eyebrows were raised in court when Goodman claimed no one asked him about hacking the royal family and police did not pursue it in 2006 because they did not want to embarrass them.

Limiting the investigation into hacking meant the NotW could maintain its line from 2007 that Goodman was a “rogue reporter”.

In the time that elapsed before the fresh inquiry, three million emails dated before 2005 were lost from the NI system, although some were later recovered.

The judge accepted the long delay in bringing a case also meant that the defendants could simply not remember everything that happened a decade or more ago, particularly Kuttner who had since suffered ill health which affected his memory.

Despite the prosecution case that Rebekah Brooks must have known about hacking, police failed to find a “smoking gun” among the reams of documents handed over by NI in 2011, her lawyer said.

Colin Montgomerie’s ex-wife Eimear Cook was the only witness to apparently prove the theory but her evidence was discredited.

She claimed Brooks confessed to knowing about phone hacking after laughingly regaling the story of her arrest for assaulting first husband Ross Kemp.

Simple fact-checking would have revealed the arrest had not even happened at the time they met, Jonathan Laidlaw QC said.

And Mark Hanna’s lawyer William Clegg QC described police as behaving like “scorched earwigs” when they failed to find the takeaway which supplied a pizza delivered by a security guard to Charlie Brooks at the same time bags were stashed in his car park.

Blunders over cell site analysis were exposed when the prosecution presented its case against Brooks, her husband Charlie and ex-NI security chief Hanna for perverting the course of justice.

Up until July 18 2011, there were eight stories from leaks and they continued after that date. On July 11 2011, police issued a press release blaming News International but the only person proved to be releasing information was an Operation Weeting officer.

It was decided not to prosecute either the officer or journalist because there was no evidence of financial payments, jurors were told.

In 2012, Sky News was broadcasting news of the search of the Brookses’ home while it was still going on, the court heard.

Rebekah Brooks was said to have remarked to officers: “We did not know this was going to happen. You have got our phones. It must have been the police leaking this.”

In his summing up, the Judge Mr Justice Saunders told the jury: “You may think that it is inevitable in a case where there is so much material that something will get overlooked.

“It is suggested that some of the police officers, not necessarily ones that you have seen, may not have done their job very well. Take all of that into account.”

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